Sick, Scrolling, and Watching Tooro Mourn Its King

I have spent the last several days in bed with a stubborn cold that turned into something worse, moving only between the bedroom, the sitting room, and whatever patch of sunlight I could find to stretch my aching body. Every so often I would manage the short distance to a place just a few kilometres from home, somewhere I could sit, or simply be near a few other people, if only to remind my body that the world still existed outside four walls. It was from that half-upright, half-defeated position that I was watching and reading news about Omukama's online.

 What met me there was not just grief. It was noise. The debates on Tooro that followed were thick with fake information, misinformation, disinformation, and every shade in between, a fog that thickened by the hour. It stung, and it still stings, to realize how much of that fog came not only from ordinary people caught up in the moment but from journalists too, people whose entire profession is built on the promise of getting it right. So even sick, even tired, even barely able to hold my phone up without my arm going numb, I found myself doing the only thing that felt useful: reading. I pulled together whatever I could find on Tooro's history, with help from a few friends, and worked my way through book after book, article after article, chasing something solid to stand on while the noise swirled around me.

 Among what I gathered was Elizabeth of Tooro, Princess Elizabeth Bagaya's own account of her life. It is, among other things, a record of loss, and it does not spare the reader. The book opens on the death of her husband, and she describes that grief as unlike anything she had lived through before, deeper even than the political terror and exile she had already survived. I read that passage twice, then a third time, the way you do when a sentence seems to be waiting for you specifically.

I thought of it the moment I saw the photograph, the one that has since spread everywhere, of Bagaya as King Oyo's remains arrived home. It is a striking image, almost unbearably so, and I found myself searching her face in it, trying to imagine what those old words might mean to her now, decades later, standing in a different kind of grief. She has already outlived tyrants. She has already buried people she loved, people whose deaths were themselves acts of violence and history. But nothing, I imagine, truly prepares a person for this: standing before the body of a young king whose whole story is woven into her own, whose life she watched unfold the way an elder watches a child grow, waiting, hoping, believing there was more time.

Watching from my sitting room, half-sick and fully heartbroken, I wondered whether she would still find her way, the next morning, to the kind of quiet joy she once wrote about, the ordinary comfort of sunlight and song, of carrying on after the worst has already happened. I wondered if that kind of resilience is a gift or a wound that simply never fully closes, reopening every time life demands it again.

 The people I watched the photograph with that day struggled to find the right words. One kept surfacing anyway: pain. Not shock, not sadness exactly, just pain, plain and heavy, the kind that sits in the chest rather than the throat.

And if that is the word we reach for on Bagaya's behalf, a woman with no title left to lose, no illusions left to protect her, what word is left for the Queen Mother? What does it do to a mother to watch her son grow into a king, to watch him carry a crown and a kingdom's expectations on shoulders still young, only to receive him home in a casket instead of watching him grow old in it?

There is a saying I keep returning to, one passed down among the Batooro elders who have sat beside royal deaths before. It is said that on the one of the days of mourning  George David Matthew Kamurasi Rukiidi III, one of the elders turned to Bagaya and told her, gently but plainly, that seeing a king die once in a lifetime is already a heavy enough thing to carry, but seeing it twice is closer to a curse. That woman, having lived past a hundred years, had already seen more than this, and she was not alone; three others beside her had witnessed it too.

 Bagaya has now witnessed it three times.

I do not know what that number does to a person. I am not sure grief obeys any kind of arithmetic, or that pain accumulates in any way we can properly measure. But sitting here, still recovering, still weak, still reaching for the next article or photograph or fragment of information that might help me understand what Tooro has lost, I keep thinking not only of Bagaya but of the ordinary people of Tooro, the women and men the kingdom's history has quietly worn down in ways no one keeps count of, and of others, unnamed, who may have been struck by loss just as immeasurable, just never photographed, never written about, never given a name in anyone's book. About what it means to carry that much history, and that much sorrow, in one body, and to still have to rise the next morning and be counted among the living.

And again, in the pages, both physical and on screen, I have noticed something else: that these transitions, kingdoms changing hands, thrones passing from one generation to the next, have never really been smooth. Not once. Not the way we like to imagine them in hindsight, tidy and dignified and inevitable. They have always come with their own struggles, their own quiet chaos, their own version of the fog I found myself standing in this past week, sick, searching, and trying to make sense of it all.

I will not wade into the discussions around musuga and the process of naming the next heir to the throne. It has become a hot topic, and it seems everyone is suddenly an expert, or something close to it. I have nothing to add to that. But we grieve with the people of Tooro. The nation is grieving.  Amahungu gatuteera!